Supporting the Eco-System of Scottish Culture
When people have written to their MSPs since the closure of the Find for Individual Artists, they’ve been getting a standard response: that the Scottish Government already invests in the Arts, and it’s up to Creative Scotland how that money is spent. What is betrayed by this response is what seems to be a genuine incomprehension of how arts investment actually works. But if politicians and civil servants fail to understand, it’s because they don’t care, and they don’t care because their constituents don’t understand how it works either.
That is a long-term fix, but the general population doesn’t understand because the broadcast media don’t understand. And that, dear friends, is more immediately down to us. We need to come up with a model that the media understands, and the scale of our task is amplified by a false model of what a life/career in the arts actually looks like.
The media and general public are under the impression that we culture folk live on a ladder…that there is government investment only in Beginners, that on top of the Beginners are the Scufflers…those who just get by from day to day, awaiting the big break that will (or more often will NOT) make them into Stars…at the top of the ladder, set for life, paying lots of tax, all over a screen near you.
Photo credit © Chantal Guevara. All rights reserved. Model is Jenny Kuo.
Now, the reason that this is the understanding of the public, the media, and not a few Beginners, Scufflers and Stars is that when culture is considered as a Business…that pyramidical structure superficially seems to apply.
But in truth, the Beginners, the Scufflers and the Stars are the SAME PEOPLE…(I’ve been all three in my time, up to a point)… and I’m still a beginner now…because each time a “project” ends, no matter how big or small, I, and all my colleagues, are all in exactly the same place. That is, we’re ALL waiting for something else to “come along.”
A life in the arts is not a ladder…it’s an eco-system. Sometimes you are doing research on an idea, sometimes you are developing that idea with a limited audience, and sometimes you seem to catch fire with an idea and it goes global. (The use of the term “viral” conveys exactly how little individual human agency seems to be part of the mix.)
My point is that everyone is in exactly the same boat, at no matter what point they’ve reached in their “career,” so that when the media goes in search of a beginner to assess the impact of cutting the Research and Development Department of the CULTURE, they are looking in the wrong place.
Different kinds of ACTIVITY demand different kinds of investment, not different kinds of people. (I’ve recently gone through a funded development process with commercial producers whose work has already appeared on Broadway.)
To use an analogy from outside showbiz, without an R & D Department, inertia may keep, say, a big pharmaceutucal company like Beechams going for a bit, but sooner rather than later, without basic R&D, followed by market testing, they’re not going to have the international sales that pay for it all.
And maybe that’s the cue we need to follow in explaining why cutting the R&D of the Fund for Individuals is a fatal blow not just to Beginners but to an entire eco-system which generates £5 billion quid for the Scottish economy (according the Scottish Government’s own figures.)
The Eco-System of Culture consists of R and D, mainly for the business to pick and choose the projects which can be shared with audiences in Scotland for the second phase of product development…before the commercial wing takes over for a few projects which go global, on stage, screen and television…and sell books and merch and all the rest of the paraphernalia which is the only bit of the iceberg that breaks the surface of public consciousness and thus political calculation.
Arguments about tax systems, or universal basic incomes, or tax breaks or whatever…can all wait until tomorrow. Today, we’re firefighting without a hosepipe. If we want the politicians and the media and the public to get smarter about the arts, we need to get smarter ourselves first. And get across the reality that we’re a culture, not a ladder. And there’s only one boat to sink or sail in together.
Editor: on Thursday 5 September at 12.30 there will be a protest organised by STUC, the Musicians Union, Equity and the Scottish Society of Playwrights outside the Scottish Parliament.
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When this country has a drugs and alcohol emergency (ongoing for years) with insufficient funds to provide rehab places and other forms of intervention how can Peter Arnott justify scarce funds being channeled to these individuals? He will probably say support for the arts is the mark of a civilised society and I would agree but a civilised society is what we do not have while tolerating this state of affairs. It’s a question of having to prioritise. I note the STUC protest next week and presume they will be modifying they wage demands on SG to support these artists? No, maybe not.
But an eco-system still has structure, niches, competition, selection, apex predators, parasites, diseases, death, the equivalent of tall trees and stunted shrubs, climate and weather. And further, government interferes with this ecosystem, so perhaps artsworld is more like the garden in Shakespeare’s Richard II, where the gardeners can make everything level in their commonwealth if they choose. Even more, the Matthew Effect applies in artsworld in ways it does not in ecosystems. Plus the contest between wren and owl in nature is not decided by a panel of judges or a grant gatekeeper.
So what, although I dislike the term, ecosystem services does artsworld supply?
https://www.nature.scot/scotlands-biodiversity/scottish-biodiversity-strategy-and-cop15/ecosystem-approach/ecosystem-services-natures-benefits
And does the cut-throat competition, cruel training practices, professional lying, endemic abuses, unmeritocratic tendencies and the fostering of privileged elites in artsworld outweigh any benefits we get from it? Just on reading the latest week’s worth of news. I mean, we’re surely beyond cherry-picking? Is the eco-system of artsworld in good health? Will it be leading the Revolution any time soon?
I don’t know a single artist or individual who has had anything to do with Creative Scotland who has a good word to say about it.
Some of the words they do use are:
A self selecting in-group busily funding each other.
Completely out of touch.
Cronyism writ large.
I’m not an artist, but it does seem like Creative Scotland might well need a rethink.
Solution is straightforward, shut down the whole thing and redirect to the priority of public sector pay increases. Simples!
It may mean little to either of you, but did you notice the funder cited on George Gunn’s poster for his new play, The Fallen Angels Of The Moine – A Highland Spaceport Fantasy, in his recent article? Creative Scotland.
One of the things Newcastle (Australia) did to support art was to offer vacant city centre properties at peppercorn rents as workshops, galleries and performance spaces.
Ironically, music and art flourished in the 80s when so many were unemployed, but the dole and housing benefits meant they could afford to live and create, without the requirement to spend 20 hours a week job-hunting. In an ideal world, a UBI would recreate that.
And in the 60s, it was ‘art school’ – so many bands / musicians started out when they met at art school, and many went there not because they were artists as such but as a kind of stop-gap, thinking / creative time at the end of their teens. As for the 80s I can say I was one of those people on the dole who used the time to develop creatively.
So whilst I am not against direct state funding at all, I agree that by whatever mechanism, allowing young people especially, time to breath and think for a while, on a basic income, is a good thing. It almost seemed to work better though when it was not by design.
There’s been quite a lot written about the creative space that the old dole made for people and how that’s now just gone. I’ll dig some out to share.
So, perhaps the hyphen in ‘eco-system’ was a clue, which interestingly I found online in this diagram “Compiled with findings from research commissioned by Arts Council England”:
https://www.a-n.co.uk/media/378093/
Now, Ben Goldacre has written quite a lot about Bad Science (including a book and blog by that name), and one of his pet peeves is (arts and) humanities graduates writing about science. In Bad Science Chapter 12: How the Media Promote the Public Misunderstanding of Science, Goldacre writes:
“My basic hypothesis is this: the people who run the media are humanities graduates with little understanding of science who wear their ignorance as a badge of honour… the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science.”
Now, forgive me if the author of this article is a professor of ecology, but this all seems part of a slapstick campaign by the arts crowd to ‘sciencify’ their demands for pecuniary satisfaction and statutory adoration. As if disguising the mercenary nature of these artists in almost-correctly-spelt scientific jargon was never going to backfire, spectacularly. Actually, I’m more interested in the obviously unhealthy power structures, cliques, abuses and hierarchies of artsworld than ever before. In which I now expect clambering devices to play a much greater role than hitherto.
OK, so if at least some “Artists and arts workers are in disarray, tied to neoliberal capitalism and state funding”
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2020/07/19/time-for-artists-mutual-aid/
why not organise in artist collectives? There’s a Wikipedia page on these but its not very mature yet. Which is kind of odd, when you think about it. But its three reasons for forming an artist collective (economic, political, professional) seem sound.